Get In, Midwesterners: We're Going on a Self-Driving Shuttle Ride

By
S.C. Stuart14 Nov 2019, 3:23 a.m.

For last-mile connections or tight loops around city centers, a number of municipalities have been experimenting with self-driving vehicles to shuttle small groups of people from point A to B. Making it happen are companies like May Mobility; COO Alisyn Malek explains.

(May Mobility shuttle in Columbus, Ohio)

Driving can be a pricey slog, but in many cities, it's the only way to get around. This has environmental impacts, turning would-be green spaces into parking lots, but also limits mobility for those who are unable to drive themselves.

Public transit fills the gap in many places, but for last-mile connections or tight loops around city centers, a number of municipalities have been experimenting with self-driving vehicles to shuttle small groups of people from point A to B.

One company making this happen is Michigan-based May Mobility, which has conducted self-driving shuttle trials in Grand Rapids, as well as Columbus, Ohio, and Providence, R.I. Full service has also been available to employees at Detroit-based real estate firm Bedrock since June 2018.

Ahead of the CoMotion LA Leadership Conference this week in Los Angeles, we spoke to Alisyn Malek, COO and Co-Founder of May Mobility, who will appear on a Thursday panel about how to integrate startups with existing public transit systems. It's something she knows a lot about, having served as head of the innovation pipeline at General Motors, and as an engineer for GM's Spark and Bolt EV Products. Here's an edited and condensed version of our conversation.

Were people freaked out at getting in and spotting the lack of a human driver? People are a little nervous to get in the vehicle the first time, but once they try it out they love it! Our riders become our best advocates in the community, helping us to increase our ridership and improve our impact to transportation. We dedicate a lot of time [to] planning what we need to do before we launch in a community, and education is a huge part of that.

How do you avoid Tesla's not-spotting-a-flatbed-truck disaster? Tesla's issue with the flatbed was specifically related to the fact that they use sensors that would not be able to identify the truck. In addition to the cameras and radars (which Tesla uses) we also deploy Lidar, which can easily spot an object like a truck that's parked, and thus getting closer, as our vehicle moves toward it.

Why did you decide on Michigan, Rhode Island, and Ohio? We first look at the local regulatory environment, which is different on a state-by-state basis. Michigan, Rhode Island, and Ohio welcome AVs through regulation and are leading the way.

Then we ask ourselves a bunch of questions: How can we reimagine cities using our autonomous technology? How can we reduce congestion in cities by providing shuttle services that are on-time and enjoyable to ride? How can we build greener communities by improving the lives of people who live in urban-cores? Is there a transit agency that has great ridership on their trunk lines, or high ridership bus and rail lines, but is struggling to help connect people to those lines and thus have routes that struggle with high headway and low ridership? These are the types of challenges that we relish in helping a community solve.

Your autonomous shuttles are often supplementing other forms of transit. Yes. For example, our six-passenger shuttles running in Providence connect an Amtrak station to other areas that were not accessible to the community until our deployment.

Tell us about the design and manufacture of your EV shuttles. Our vehicles start their lives as a Polaris GEM LSEV, built in Anaheim, California. We then bring them to our upfitter partner here in Michigan to complete the conversion into a May Mobility self-driving shuttle.

What kind of modifications do you make to them? We've extended the rear door to make it easier for people to get in and out with our carriage-style seating, and installed a full glass roof to provide an amazing city skyline view. We also want the vehicles to appear approachable—and not like a science project—so we designed housings for our sensors that allow them to fit more seamlessly into the exterior of the vehicle.

You've raised $33 million in funding to date. Who are your major investors and what made them come onboard? BMW iVentures, Toyota AI Ventures, Detroit Venture Partners, Y Combinator, and RePower Group are all investors with deep insight into the autonomous industry, and understand how challenging it is to launch a self-driving mobility service, especially one that is aiming to [work] directly with end consumers.

This is a real business, not just a 'cool factor' smart city hack. Exactly. Few in this space have really balanced the tech with overall unit economics like we have. We've been able to get clarity on revenue versus costs for the long haul through our focus on working directly with municipalities and private enterprises; identifying ridership and transportation needs pre-launch; and examining in great detail the road networks and traffic environments the vehicles will be operating in, and how we solve specifically for that.

Tell us why you made a decision to stay in the Midwest. I'm a firm believer that success in mobility will come from a combination of Silicon Valley's focus on the end user, with Detroit's focus on making durable, reliable products. In terms of autonomy, there's nowhere in the world better suited to developing the vehicle systems than the Midwest, due to the interesting interaction of the hardware (the car moving through the world) and safety critical software (all of the autonomous driving software).

How did you get into the automotive/autonomy field? While doing my undergrad in mechanical engineering, I spent a year in Freiburg, Germany—the solar capital of the country—with access to great transit, and it convinced me that our energy use and transportation approach could be different. So I shifted my focus and ended up doing an internship at GM on the Chevrolet Volt concept car, then got hired into the engineering division for the electric vehicles line before moving to GM Ventures.

Which was where you first got a taste for automation. Right. It was in GM Ventures that I started working with companies developing self-driving technology, including Cruise Automation, which GM eventually acquired, and I got to work on taking the technology to market.

Finally, where next for May Mobility's rollout? We're not sharing news yet about our next rollout, but we are always looking for communities with transportation challenges we can help solve.